MarK Dean: Holder of 3 of 9 Patents for Personal Computer
Posted on 23. Jul, 2009 by Leshell Hatley in Industry News, News, PhD, Research, Scholarly Celebrations
Dr. Mark Dean
Mark Dean is an inventor and a computer scientist. He holds three of the nine original IBM patents upon which the IBM PC personal computers were based. He led the team that developed the ISA bus, and he led the design team responsible for creating the first one-gigahertz computer processor chip.
Born in Jefferson City, Tennessee, Dean holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Florida Atlantic University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Dean is the first African-American to become an IBM Fellow which is the highest level of technical excellence at the company. In 1997, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Currently, he is an IBM Vice President overseeing the company’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.
Mark Dean 1998 holding the first Gigaherz (1000mhz) chip
Dean led a team that developed the interior architecture (ISA systems bus) that enables multiple devices, such as modems and printers, to be connected to personal computers. Dean made history again by leading the design team responsible for creating the first 1-gigahertz processor chip, another significant step in making computers faster and smaller.
Dr. Dean has said
“when I was accepted at Stanford I had been out of school for ten years, so it was very difficult. I encourage people to go on to graduate school, but they should not wait as long as I did. It makes it very hard, But for me it was definitely the right thing to do and Stanford was the right place to do it. In hindsight, Stanford was the best choice because I already knew what I wanted to work on and both David Dill and then Mark Horowitz enthusiastically supported me in pursuing the research tropic I wanted to work on. The research I engaged in as a graduate student was very prudent, in that while some of the technology isn’t necessarily what we are doing today, it did allow me to better understand the best ways (pros and cons of certain approaches) to approach the development of processes. I came to Stanford with no knowledge of either circuits or processes, I knew logic design, architectures, bus interfaces and protocol, but I had no real knowledge of transistors, silicon processes and circuits. Stanford was my first exposure to custom circuits design to building things at transistor level. I am now managing a group focused on high-speed circuit design and I couldn’t have done it without the background I received at Stanford.”
ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
***In 1995, Dr. Dean was named an IBM Fellow in 1995, one of only 50 active fellows of IBM’s 300,000 employees. Dean was the first African American to be honored with IBM Fellowship.
***In 1997 Dean was Vice President of Performance for the RS/6000 Division and, along with his colleague Dennis Moeller, Dean was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame which has under 150 members. For inventing “a system that has allowed PCs to become part of our lives.”
***In 1999, as Director of IBM’s Austin Research Lab (in Austin, Texas), he lead the team that built a gigaherz (1000mhz) chip which did a billion calculations per second.
***In 2001 he was elected member of the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) .
***In 2004, Dr. Dean was selected as one of the 50 Most Important Blacks in Research Science.
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